Privileged

by Zoey Dean

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Great.” She tugged at my hand. “Introduce me.”

  We joined the trio, and I quickly introduced Will to Lily Langley, who knew me from our séjour linguistique in Switzerland.

  “You’re in New York now?” Will asked. “My mom lives in the city. Next time I’m up, maybe I can see your play.”

  “If it hasn’t closed,” Lily quipped.

  Damn. These two were chatting like the two confident, eleven-on-a-looks-scale-of-ten people they were.

  “I saw the Entertainment Tonight thing about you,” Rose said to Lily. “You got cast in the movie version of your play, right?”

  Lily smiled. “Cast might be too strong a word. But I know they’re going to look at me for the part. Then all I have to do is beat out Natalie Portman.” Lily rolled her eyes. “As if that’ll happen.”

  Sage sniffed. “She’s totally overrated.”

  “So you two know each other from way back,” Will remarked, looking from Lily to me. The mere idea of me made him sound stiff. “Small world.”

  Lily gave him a flirtatious look. “You seem to know a lot more about me than I know about you. Megan said you live next door.”

  “That’s all she said?” Rose asked, looking at me like I was crazy.

  “And that we’re friends,” I added. My voice, I realized, sounded as strained as Will’s.

  “Well, I hope we can be friends, too,” Lily told Will. “Maybe we’ll catch up later?”

  “Sure,” he allowed, with another quick glance at me. “That sounds good.”

  “Hot guy,” Lily observed as Will and the twins headed off toward the bar for refills.

  The best I could muster was a very weak “Yeah.”

  Veronica hooks up with a new guy every two months. Her younger sister, Alexandra, snags a new guy every five months. Assuming that Veronica and Alexandra get with guys at a steady rate, at the end of ten years, how many more guys will Veronica have kissed than Alexandra?

  (a)46

  (b)27

  (c)59

  (d)36

  (e)Eat dirt and die, you jealous cow.

  Chapter Thirty

  Iwalked with Lily to the food tent, which had been divided into three different catering areas. There was French for the foodie types; organic vegetarian for the Hollywood types; and Brazilian churrasco for the Atkins types, with all manner of meat being roasted on an open pit. The aroma wafted to me like a come-hither signal. All at once, I was starving.

  “You’re Lily Langley, right?” A sixtyish, stick-thin woman in candy-cane-striped silk grabbed Lily’s right hand as we stepped into the tent. “Darling, you are a gift to the American theater!”

  “Thank you so much. This is my sis—friend Megan Smi—”

  “Lovely to meet you,” the woman trilled, but she was already brushing past us, her gaze scanning the area for more important people.

  “Pick a line,” Lily said. I pointed to the meat. As we were heading for it, one of Lily’s actress friends from New York ran over and grabbed her arm. “Lily, Dominick Dunne is holding court by the blind-auction tent. He wants to meet you.”

  Lily looked at me, hesitating.

  “Go,” I insisted. “You can eat later.”

  She gave me a hug and whispered, “I’ll call you right after midnight, and we’ll meet on the beach.”

  Frankly, it was easier this way. Pretending that my sister wasn’t my sister was a new low, even for me. I got some succulent-looking slices of grilled steak and ate them standing in a corner, watching the parade passing by. I saw a model from the fashion show with her boyfriend. He was gorgeous, but even in her velvet ballet flats, she had four inches on him. There was a ninety-something couple swaying to the big-band music coming from the speakers. The only person I really wanted to be with tonight—Will—didn’t want to be with me.

  I passed dozens of people on the walkway from the tennis courts down to the ocean; I didn’t know most of them. I heard a couple “Lovely job in the fashion show” and “Fantastic dress!” comments, but already, the me who had flirted with an audience while strutting in a ten-thousand-dollar one-of-a-kind dress had crawled back into her shell.

  As I approached the twins’ pool deck—the rock wall was beyond it—I saw Sage striding past the steps down to the beach. She was heading for her friends at the bar near the stage. Suddenly, Thom, who was dressed in his Heavenly deckhand outfit, bolted up the steps from the beach three at a time, slung his arms around her from behind, and planted a steamy kiss on the back of her neck.

  Sage screamed. Then she spun around. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  Thom staggered. The kiss obviously had been intended for her sister. “Sage! Shit! I am so sorry,” Thom apologized breathlessly.

  I saw Rose and the usual suspects—Suzanne, Precious, Dionne—come running, drawn by Sage’s scream.

  “I’m so, so sorry, Sage,” Thom hastened to explain. “I thought you were Rose.”

  “Rose? You thought I was Rose? What kind of bullshit excuse is . . .” All that SAT training paid off as she made the intellectual leap. Her jaw fell open. “Oh my God. Rose, you’re doing the cabin boy?” She threw her head back and laughed into the night. “That is so . . . desperate!”

  I looked at Rose, whose face had turned a shade of red that was usually reserved for me.

  “Look, no offense, Sage,” Thom said. “But what Rose does and who she does it with really isn’t any of your business.”

  “Listen, you little leech. Everything my sister does is my business. Have you been fucking my sister while you’re supposed to be working?”

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” he replied, looking genuinely offended.

  Sage’s smile was lethal. “I’m going to bury you.”

  “Go for it, Sage,” Thom encouraged her, then held out a hand to Rose. “Come on, Rose. Let’s get out of here.”

  With everything in me that still believed in love, if not for myself then certainly for her, I rooted for Rose to take his hand. Come on, I thought. Come on. Take his hand and walk away. Please, Rose. Take his hand.

  Instead, she stepped backward. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  That was all it took. Thom shook his head, not taking his eyes off her. “I can’t . . .” But he never finished his sentence. I could only imagine the betrayal he felt as he walked away alone.

  “What’d you do, Rose? Flash him and he fell in love or something?” Precious asked. “That’s so pathetic!”

  Rose smiled and excused herself. I headed after her, hoping the others didn’t see me, but she was hard to find on a beach crowded with revelers. It was only when I got to the thin nautical rope on the beach that marked the dividing point between Les Anges and the Phillips’ property, Barbados, that I saw Rose sitting in the sand near the waterline.

  I dropped down next to her but didn’t say anything. She lobbed a few pebbles toward the incoming waves. I did, too. Then she skimmed a few small stones into the ocean.

  “You hate me,” she said finally.

  “No.”

  “I hate me. I can’t believe I ruined things with Thom.”

  “Maybe it’s not too late?” I offered. “You could apologize, you know.”

  “And how would I do that?” she asked, lobbing a bigger rock into the water.

  “Throw your arms around him, plead temporary insanity, and ask if he wants you to put up a billboard on Worth Avenue announcing that you’re a couple,” I advised.

  She looked cockeyed at me. “Worth Avenue doesn’t allow billboards.”

  I smiled and smoothed back her hair. She leaned against me, almost the way a child would against her mother. “You’ll figure it out,” I counseled. “Skywriting?”

  “That’s a thought.”

  We headed back, holding our heels in our hands and silently walking in the waves. By the time we’d reached the bottom of the steps, it seemed like the enti
re party had gathered on the beach to count down the final seconds of the year.

  “Ten, nine, eight . . .” More and more people joined in, counting down to midnight.

  “Five, four, three, two, one. Happy New Year!”

  The noise was deafening as the sky filled with a fabulous fireworks display, color bursting upon color, ruby bleeding to emerald and then to silver and gold. The beach lit up as the show glowed overhead. I looked around at the crowds watching the sky, at all the couples embracing to welcome in the new year.

  And that was when I saw Lily in Will’s arms. He was kissing her the way I’d dreamed of his kissing me. I felt my heart ache. The year was ruined, and it was only a few seconds old.

  Choose the word or phrase that best defines the following word:

  EPIPHANY

  (a)a sudden and significant realization

  (b)the new Britney Spears perfume

  (c)eternity

  (d)sarcastic

  (e)finally reaching your goal weight!

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!

  No shit.

  Most people think William Shakespeare is responsible for that pithy truth, but it was, in fact, Sir Walter Scott. I think when a person (meaning me) ends up being the walking definition of such a quote, she should at least know who the hell is responsible for it.

  It was a simple case of anesthetization, Palm Beach–style. After seeing Lily in a liplock with Will, I stumbled to the nearest bar, grabbed a bottle of Cristal, and spent the first half hour of the New Year guzzling it, hiding out in my suite.

  Lily called me around twelve-thirty, by which time I had made a serious dent in the bubbly. I told her I wasn’t feeling well—true enough, though not for any physical reason—and was going to bed. She wanted to come up and give me a hug, since she’d be jetting back to New York in the wee hours of the morning. I put her off. I was going to sleep. She should stay at the party. Have fun. Keep kissing Will.

  Okay, I didn’t say the last one.

  Personally, I’ve never been a big believer in karma. When the distraught woman on the evening news thanks God for saving her, her family, and her home from the terrible tornado, I always wonder about the family next door who lost everything. So was God, like, really pissed off at them? The whole what-goes-around-comes-around thing is simply our way of trying to make sense out of things that make no sense. Great stuff happens to bad people. Bad shit happens to good people. This is just the way it is.

  But if I did believe in karma, I would say that watching my sister kiss Will was exactly what I deserved. I couldn’t blame Lily. She had no way of knowing how I felt about Will. I couldn’t blame Will, either, because there was this little thing called a boyfriend I’d hidden from him. All I could do was blame myself.

  I pounded the bottle and fell asleep; I didn’t wake for hours. I squinted at the luminous hands of the clock on the nightstand. It was just past five. I sat up. I felt as if a football team were doing up-downs inside my head. I sat up and turned on the lamp. My eight-hundred-thread-count Egyptian-cotton pillowcase was now adorned with a Jackson Pollock–esque mini-canvas of mascara, lipstick, and drool.

  There are few things as awful as a champagne hangover at five-thirty in the morning. One of the few is said champagne hangover compounded by an awful memory of what prompted the drinking bout in the first place. The thought of Will doing things to Lily that I had imagined him doing to me made me run to the bathroom and puke my guts out. Interestingly enough, barfing in a mansion after chugging Cristal is just as nasty as barfing in a fifth-floor East Village walk-up after downing too many Long Island iced teas, an experience I’d endured at Charma’s summer tar-beach birthday party on our roof, my only other up-close-and-personal visit with the porcelain throne.

  I showered, brushed my teeth, and, feeling only marginally more human, decided to go out on my balcony to get some fresh air. The torchlights by the pool below were still burning, though the party was long over. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was Sage and Rose. They were going at it. Big-time.

  “Why do you ruin everything for me, Sage?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Sage responded. She was stripping out of her clothes as she spoke.

  “Thom!”

  “Who the fuck is Thom?” Sage asked, yanking off her shirt. And then derisive laughter. “You mean the cabin boy?”

  “He’s not just the cabin boy,” Rose told her sister.

  “Oh my God! You really do like him!” Sage stepped into the shallow end of the pool. “Well, don’t blame me, you’re the one who let him walk away. Oh my God. This feels great. Hey, get some champagne from the cabana.”

  Rose didn’t move. “What’s it like, Sage?” Her voice was low now. I had to strain to hear.

  Sage slid into the water, grabbed a floating noodle, and rolled onto her back. “What’s what like?”

  “To be you. To always be so sure about everything.”

  “It’s great, Rose.” Sage pulled herself up on the opposite side of the pool and sat there, looking as perfect as a human can look while clad in nothing but youth, great genes, and nipple piercings. “Maybe your taste in guys just sucks, Rose. Ever think of that?”

  “Oh, so I should be like you? Fuck whoever I want and never care about anyone or anything?”

  “Whatever.” Sage got up and padded over to a pile of fluffy, oversize pink and aqua towels. “Go get the champagne, Rose. Seriously.”

  “I can’t believe you sometimes.” I heard the tightness in Rose’s voice. She was close to tears.

  “Boo-hoo, poor you,” Sage sang out.

  “I hate you!” The ragged sound was torn from someplace deep inside of Rose.

  “Like I fucking care,” Sage jeered.

  “You guys, you guys, stop!” It was out of my mouth before I had considered whether or not I should intervene.

  They looked up at the balcony, shocked that I’d overheard them. I pulled on a robe and ran downstairs. When I got there, Rose was sitting alone at a table, and Sage was wrapped in a huge towel, lying on a chaise longue and guzzling the champagne she’d retrieved from the cabana.

  “Go away,” Sage told me.

  I ignored her and sat on the end of her chaise. “You’re saying things you don’t mean because you’re upset.”

  Sage balanced the champagne bottle on her stomach and eyed me around it. “They teach you that at Yale?”

  “No,” I replied. “My parents taught me that. God knows I’ve made a lot of mistakes anyway . . .” I stopped myself. This could not be about me. “Maybe Rose should have told you about Thom, but you have to understand why she didn’t. She cares so much about what you think.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Sage muttered.

  I looked over at Rose, who wasn’t saying a word. Her head was tucked into her chest, and she had wrapped her arms around herself as if she could physically bind in her own pain.

  I turned back to Sage. “Rose told me a story. About the day the two of you left New York after your parents died. How scared she was on the plane. You know how she got through it, Sage? She got through it because of you.”

  Sage smiled in an unamused way. “I know. I heard her tell it to you. When you two were out on the deck in the Bahamas.” Sage turned toward Rose. “You had no right to tell her that. No right at all.”

  Rose nodded mutely.

  “You’re such an asshole.” Sage’s words to her sister were as stinging as ever. Then she was silent.

  I was looking out toward the water, trying to clear my foggy head and decide what else I could say, when I heard a sniffle.

  “How do you think I got through it, Rose?” Sage asked her sister, tears in her voice. She put down the champagne bottle and sat up, swinging her legs toward Rose. “Do you think I held your hand just for you?”

  I saw the realization dawn on Rose’s face. “But you didn’t seem scared.�
�

  “Don’t let it get around.” Sage reached out and took her sister’s hand, as she had all those years ago. “I . . . don’t want to lose you to anyone, okay?”

  Rose sniffled loudly and nodded.

  I stood. “I’m going to the beach to watch the sunrise. You guys should be alone.” I headed down the stone staircase and across the planked walkway to the temporary dock. I walked out to the very end. A minute later, I heard two sets of footfalls as the twins joined me. We stood together for a long time in silence, as the first shards of daylight pierced the sky.

  “Sage?” Rose asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “As long as we have each other, we’re not orphans.”

  They cried. I cried. The sun rose on all of us, all cried out.

  When we finally went back inside, I hugged them both, then headed back to my suite. There was one more thing I had to do. My iBook was on. I clicked on the folder labeled TWINS, the one filled with notes I’d kept so diligently for my exposé. There was so much I could write if I wanted to, because at last I had it figured out.

  Every time it had looked like Rose was growing close to me, Sage had freaked out. It had happened in the Bahamas, it had happened on the pool deck when Sage had oh-so-maturely thrown the pencil at her sister, and it had happened—albeit briefly—when Sage had realized that Rose knew more about my trip to Clewiston with Will than she did. Rose had told me that Sage hated all her boyfriends. But Rose could have hooked up with Orlando Bloom plus Bill Gates’s bank account and Sage would have had the same reaction. The equation was simple. Rose + anyone = the possibility of Sage without Rose.

  So much crap to cover so much insecurity, I mused. But maybe that’s what happens when your parents die young, and all you have left are your sister and your bravado to get you through the scary moments.

  I clicked on the TWINS folder and held my finger over my keyboard. And then I pressed “delete.”

  Identify which part, if any, of the following sentence is incorrect:

  (a) Sometimes a little bit (b) of bribery is the only way to (c) achieve a (d) significant goal. (e) No error